“... of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set you’d find in which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and ...”

“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... it was recovered; even more remarkable, seven hundred hours of work by luthiers at London’s W.E. Hill and Sons, founded in 1762, restored it to supposedly better shape than before.The recovery​ of Hermann’s cello is Kennedy’s sleuthing triumph. He had been given the Gagliano in 1928 by Louise Bachiene and Jaap de Graaff, wealthy Dutch admirers of his ...”

“... never gets into a film except as part of the plot.In the evening, read at St Mark’s, Primrose Hill in aid of the appeal against the demolition of the chapel of the old Boys’ Home in Regent’s Park Road and the construction of some frightful block of flats. Church packed, people standing at the back, and though the audience is a bit sticky to start with ...”

“... Most men when? Enright’s review begins (a hilarious category mistake) by comparing Nabokov to Peter De Vries: ‘whereas De Vries despairs of his fellow beings without ceasing to love them altogether ...’ My pop-eyed italics. The friend of the world is nigh. But love is an exclusive emotion. Loving mankind is a logical contradiction, produced by too ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road ...”

“... up lorry drivers (or what he fondly imagines to be lorry drivers) in the lavatories of Notting Hill, the other claiming to have exuberant sex with his wife. The best line comes when the gay one asks, re some straight sexual marathon: ‘How long did it go on?’ ‘Well if you include the foreplay and the wind-down afterwards I don’t suppose we had much ...”

“... The war​ rescued my father, Peter Raban, from his first job as a probationary teacher in the West Midlands and restored him to his proper station as an officer and a gentleman. He had hoped to go on to university (Oxford or Cambridge) from his boarding school in Worcester but his dismal Higher School Certificate results nixed that ambition ...”

“... so frustrating. On a fine September day in 1860 the author had a gigantic bonfire at Gad’s Hill in which ‘the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years’ were ruthlessly destroyed. His sons, Henry and Plorn, carried basketful after basketful to the flames. As he watched the records of his life turn to smoke, Dickens exclaimed: ‘Would to God ...”

“... hyperbole and domesticates the particles. In ‘Sheep’s Skulls’ the sheep die On the open hill, and raven and buzzard Come like women to clean them. Like women: a lesser poet than Gillian Clarke would have eked out the comparison and made too much of the domestic rite it alludes to. Sometimes she, too, makes too much of her occasions. When someone ...”

“... once he left the scene, but here too things didn’t work out as planned. In 1967, Robert Hill, an editor at Pope’s American publisher, J.B. Lippincott, decided to give another writer he’d spotted a chance to fill the gap in the market. He wrote to Patrick O’Brian, who duly signed a contract headed: ‘Untitled novel about an 18th-century naval ...”

“... out to be a certain Miss Ellis (possibly a coded reference to one of Bishop’s teachers at Walnut Hill school, where the poem was written) in disguise. She is figured in the drawings as a bunny rabbit flanked by two birds, one perched and one hovering. Penguins, of course, can’t fly, and there is a characteristic irony in Bishop’s identifying herself with ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... New Yorker,’ she wrote to her mother on 9 and 10 February. On the 11th, she wrote ‘Parliament Hill Fields’: ‘Your absence is inconspicuous;/Nobody can tell what I lack,’ the first stanza ends. The speaker’s winter walk home takes in a crocodile of small girls, a pink plastic barrette, a cloudbank, ‘I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at ...”